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Ag Outlook: Brazil is looking at largest soybean crop ever

Global economics and the impact for agriculture were a key focus during the Annual Ag Outlook yesterday.

Brad Magnusson, CEO of Magnusson Consulting Group covered a lot of ground from oil and gas prices to the war in Ukraine, and more. 

A key area of interest is the potential impact of an increase in U.S. acres.

He says the USDA is expecting to see an increase in soybeans, winter wheat and spring wheat, with corn acres jumping 1.9 million acres.

"Now what impact is that having? Well, first of all, we're starting to see fertilizers slide in the form of nitrogen. I think a lot of us including ourselves, bought expensive nitrogen in and around $1100 in the fall.  It's down to around about $910 yesterday ( Monday )."

He notes the biggest problem that a lot of fertilizer companies are having right now is delivery issues adding that he anticipates fertilizer prices will come back up as the demand increases.

Another key area to watch is Brazil, where they have a very, very large bean crop that could see production hit 154 or 159.1 million tonnes making it their largest soybean crop ever.

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From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids